Liam Herringshaw
Dr Liam Herringshaw - Ask A Palaeontologist
This month we chat to Liam Herringshaw, Palaeontologist at Hidden Horizons and Director of the Yorkshire Fossil Festival.
- Name: Liam Herringshaw
- Job: Palaeontologist, Hidden Horizons & Director, Yorkshire Fossil Festival
- Location: York and Scarborough, UK
What inspired you to become a scientist?
I never saw myself becoming a scientist and in many ways I still don’t. I certainly didn’t enjoy science very much at school, although I was always interested in the Earth and natural history. It was my A-Level Geography teacher, Nancy Reid, who encouraged me to study Geology. Thanks to her encouragement, I did, and from there I became an Earth scientist, almost by accident.
What inspired you to become a palaeontologist?
I’m not quite sure, but again, my A-Level teacher Nancy Reid was very important. She led the first geology fieldtrip I went on, to Wren’s Nest National Nature Reserve in Dudley, and hunting for fossils there was a lightbulb moment. Five years later, having studied Geology & Physical Geography at the University of Liverpool (where my tutors, especially Jim Marshall, Pat Brenchley and Charlie Underwood, made palaeontology seem like a really interesting subject to explore further), I chose to begin a Ph.D. on the rare and problematical fossils of Wren’s Nest at the University of Birmingham. I wasn’t a very good Ph.D. student, and I no longer study Silurian sea life, but my supervisors – Alan Thomas and Paul Smith – gave me excellent support and palaeontological training.
Describe your work/job
I work as a palaeontologist for Hidden Horizons (https://hiddenhorizons.co.uk/), a company based at The Fossil Shop in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. I run family fossil hunts, dinosaur footprint walks, schools activities, and geology trips for universities and other organizations, and use our museum-quality replica fossils (GeoEd Ltd: https://www.geoed.co.uk/) to teach online palaeontology classes. I also organize the annual Yorkshire Fossil Festival (https://yorkshirefossilfestival.co.uk/), northern England’s biggest annual celebration of fossils and palaeontology. Occasionally, I pretend to still be an active palaeontological researcher – I am mostly interested in the evolution of burrowing organisms in marine environments.
What’s the best part of your job?
Talking to people about fossils, and why they are amazing.
What other jobs have you done?
From 2015 to 2020, I was a lecturer in Geology at the University of Hull, until I decided that university mismanagement was making me sick, and quit. Before that I worked as a researcher at universities in England, Scotland and Canada. I have also worked in a university finance office, as a scientific editor and tutor, and as an occasional cricket writer.
What were your favourite subjects at school?
Creative writing, physical geography, statistics.
Where did you study geoscience/palaeontology?
B.Sc. at Liverpool, Ph.D at Birmingham.
What hobbies do you have outside of palaeontology?
Playing, watching, and writing about cricket. Changing the lyrics of popular songs into palaeontological versions. Writing unpublishable children’s books. Reading good books. Talking too much.
What is your favourite fossil?
The 13-rayed Silurian starfish, Lepidaster grayi.
What’s your favourite place that you have travelled to study palaeontology?
Wren’s Nest National Nature Reserve, Dudley. Yes, Morocco and the southwestern US and northern Patagonia and Cyprus and Newfoundland are all fantastic, but my favourite fossil site is a 428 million year-old patch reef in a West Midlands housing estate.
Why is it important for us to study palaeontology?
Study the past if you would divine the future.
What advice would you give to somebody interested in becoming a palaeontologist?
Be a palaeontologist, if you want to. Study fossils and ancient life if studying fossils and ancient life grabs you. Join a local group, or volunteer in a museum, or sign up for a degree – whatever’s available and appropriate for you. Chat to people about how they got into palaeontology and what they’ve done to stay there. You may not be able to get a paid job in palaeontology – there are disappointingly few positions out there – but that might not matter. You don’t need to be a professional palaeontologist to be an excellent palaeontologist. Plenty of excellent palaeontologists have other jobs. Chat to them. They might have some relevant advice. They might know of useful opportunities. They might not. It doesn’t matter – even the act of talking can help you better understand what you want to do, and how you might go about it. I’m still trying to work that out myself, more than 20 years since I began my Ph.D., but I am definitely a palaeontologist of some kind, and that’s grand.
What's a typical day like in In The Life Of The Yorkshire Fossil Festival Director?
- 09.00 Arrive on site to see if the Festival tents have blown down overnight. Make sure the exhibitors are all happy with their stands, and that the Festival staff and volunteers know what’s going on. Chat to the town crier about what needs to be announced to the public.
- 11.00 Host an online lecture via Zoom, then get ready to take part in a dinosaur footprint hunt in Scarborough’s South Bay.
- 13.00 Forget to get lunch. Bump into friends unexpectedly, and chat about a potential research project on early Jurassic trace fossils. Encourage said friends’ children to go the storytelling session starting at 1.30pm.
- 15.00 Walk round the Festival site, chatting to Festival-goers and checking that exhibitors, staff and volunteers are all happy. Discuss things that could happen at next year’s Festival, and inspect an amazing trace fossil specimen brought in by a local collector. Dash back to the laptop when you realise you’ve failed to start the Twitter poll for the second semi-final of Yorkshire’s Favourite Fossil.
- 17.00 Now the Festival is closed for the day, make sure everything that everything valuable has been locked away. Hurriedly grab some chips, then go to watch The Land Before Time with your better half and five year-old daughter.
- 19.00 Host an online musical event about women in palaeontology via Zoom, then dash up the hill to the cinema to introduce a special screening of the Kate Winslet film Ammonite.
Liam Online
- Follow Liam on Twitter @fossiliam
- Follow Liam on Instagram @fossiliam
- Check out Liam's website fossilhub.org